How to scale coded text units without bias: A response to Gemenis

Coding non-manifesto documents as if they were genuine policy platforms produced at election time clearly raises serious issues with error when these codings are used in the standard manner to estimate left-right policy positions. In addition to the long term solution of improving the document base of the Manifesto Project identified by Gemenis (2012), we argue that immediate gains in manifesto-based estimates of policy positions can be realised by using the confrontational logit scales from Lowe et al. (2011), which addresses the problems of scale content and scale construction that are exacerbated by but not unique to the problems found in proxy documents.     

Sharing the Fruit of Labor: Flexible Application of Justice Principles in an Ultimatum Game with Joint-Production

Individuals often need to negotiate how to distribute jointly produced goods—equally (e.g., 50:50) or equitably (e.g., proportionally to their contributions). We examined whether people have stable preferences, or whether they switch between equality and equity in different situations. Pairs of anonymous participants first produced a common pie, and then distributed it in an ultimatum game. Results suggest that individuals apply different justice principles depending on their contribution. When they produced less than 50%, proposers divided the pie equally. However, when they produced more than 50%, their offers fell between equality and equity. Responders’ ratings of fairness and satisfaction varied similarly; with low production, equality was preferred, whereas with high production, equity was preferred. Nevertheless, equal and equitable offers were generally accepted, and only outright unfair offers were rejected. This suggests that individuals are relatively flexible about which justice principle should be applied, but punish proposers whose offers violate both principles.     

Particle size analysis of soils under simulated scene of crime conditions: the interest of multivariate analyses

Two simulated scenes of crime have been studied. Soil traces adhering to boots, sport shoes and tissues have been compared with control samples using particle size analysis. Comparisons of percentage of particles per class interval and multivariate analyses were used to determine how the size distribution of each suspect sample varied compared to the original distribution. A loss of coarse fractions characterized most of the suspect samples even though they were derived from soils having different distributional patterns. However, the differences between control and suspect samples were found to be more important for soils dominated by extreme size classes than for soils rich in medium size particles. The differences among soil samples from the same source were found to be restricted to the extreme size classes. The finding of significant differences within size classes ranging from 1 to 0.063 mm should be then considered as a dissimilarity sign between trace sample and hypothetic control soil.     

The Basic Arithmetic of Legislative Decisions

Despite the huge number of possible seat distributions following a general election in a multiparty parliamentary democracy, there are far fewer classes of seat distribution sharing important strategic features. We define an exclusive and exhaustive partition of the universe of theoretically possible n‐party systems into five basic classes, the understanding of which facilitates more fruitful modeling of legislative politics, including government formation. Having defined a partition of legislative party systems and elaborated logical implications of this partition, we classify the population of postwar European legislatures. We show empirically that many of these are close to critical boundary conditions, so that stochastic processes involved in any legislative election could easily flip the resulting legislature from one type to another. This is of more than hypothetical interest, since we also show that important political outcomes differ systematically between the classes of party systems—outcomes that include duration of government formation negotiations, type of coalition cabinet that forms, and stability of the resulting government.     

Bots,cops, and corporations: on the limits of enforcement and the promise of polycentric regulation as a way to control large-scale cybercrime

Botnets currently pose the most serious threat to the digital ecosystem, providing an infrastructure that enables bank fraud, distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), and click fraud. During the past few years, three main approaches have been used to fight botnets. First, police organizations have periodically arrested prominent hackers and scammers, hoping such high-profile operations would have a deterrent effect. Second, Microsoft has performed a number of takedowns, using an innovative blend of legal and technical means that attempt to disrupt botnet operations and reduce their profitability. Third, some countries – Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Netherlands, and Germany – encourage harm reduction strategies that rely on public-private partnerships involving internet service providers, anti-virus companies, and regulatory authorities. This article describes these three approaches (incapacitation, disruption, and harm reduction), the challenges they face, and their respective effectiveness in protecting the digital ecosystem from large-scale online harm.     

Investigating mobility patterns for repetitive sexual contact in adult child sex offending

In the present study, geographic mobility exhibited by child sex offenders was examined. Geographic mobility was defined as the use of multiple locations to obtain repetitive sexual contact with the same victim. The sample consisted of 77 adult offenders convicted for having committed a sexual offence against a child, and who agreed to provide confidential self-report data concerning their offending behaviours. Based on a set of offence characteristics, offenders who used a single location were compared to offenders who used multiple locations for sexual contact. Results showed that offenders who used multiple locations are more likely to isolate the victim, use violence, involve the victim in several sexual episodes, abuse the victim for a period exceeding one year, and make the victim participate and perform sexual behaviours on them during sexual episodes. Examining more closely offenders who used multiple locations for abuse, three offence patterns were further identified (i.e., familial-low mobility offence, non familial-high mobility offence, and familial-high mobility offence). Going for a car ride was also found to be a common location/situation used in the familial-low mobility offence subgroup, while the use of outdoor locations on a regular basis was found to be rare in high mobility patterns subgroups.     

The Evolution of Party Systems between Elections

Most existing theoretical work on party competition pays little attention to the evolution of party systems between elections as a result of defections between parties. In this article, we treat individual legislators as utility-maximizing agents tempted to defect to other parties if this would increase their expected payoffs. We model the evolution of party systems between elections in these terms and discuss this analytically, exploring unanswered questions using computational methods. Under office-seeking motivational assumptions, our results strikingly highlight the role of the largest party, especially when it is "dominant" in the technical sense, as a pole of attraction in interelectoral evolution.     

Belgian newspapers v Google News: 2-0

Legal context: Belgian copyright law prohibits the reproduction and publishingof works without the permission of its authors. The law, however,organizes a set of exceptions, including the quotation exception,and the news reporting exception. Key issues: Google infringes the rights of the authors by reproducing andpublishing works protected by copyright via both Google Newsand via its cached hyperlinks on www.google.be. Exceptions?The judge has considered that Google does not benefit from anyof the exceptions provided by Belgian law: neither the quotationexception, neither the news reporting exception. Implied licence?Copyright is a right of prior consent of the authors. Googlemay not argue that it acts with the implicit consent of thewebsite publishers by arguing that they could opt out from GoogleNews by the use of technical means. Practical significance: If upheld on appeal, this ruling constitutes a dangerous precedentfor the web actors, for it assumes search engines should explicitlyask prior permission to publish cache content information orexcerpts of articles. It therefore opens the door to furtherlawsuits, especially in Europe. This ruling could have an impactbeyond the internet field and adversely affect similar situations,such as radio press reviews.